Blog: Embracing the Retail Self-Scanning Technology

With an estimated 30.9 billion IoT-enabled devices¹ globally by 2025, connectivity has driven a 119% increase in self-scanning technology use in markets like Germany from 2021 to 2023. This trend is set to continue growing rapidly into 2024 and beyond.

Despite this growth, brick-and-mortar retailers face significant challenges, including economic pressures, sustainability concerns, labor shortages, and the cost-of-living crisis. Meeting the high expectations of today's customers is essential; retailers must invest in unified, mobile experiences to stay competitive – always having an eye on the operational part.

Retailers must adapt to this new age of rapid change by leveraging technological solutions to address issues. Customers demand speed, convenience, and personalization. It’s an age where 73% of customers now prefer self-checkout over staffed checkout lines² where self-scanning perfectly weaves in the convenience and personalization aspect.

The growing demand for flexibility in retail interactions
New technologies and changing shopping behaviors are driving significant growth in self-service across the retail industry. From mobile in-store journeys to self-checkout, consumers now want flexibility in how they interact and transact with retailers. Investing in self-checkout and self-scanning technologies has been pivotal for retailers' digital transformation.

We see retailers embracing mobile technology to elevate the store experience as self-scanning technology allows for personalized promotions and faster checkouts, with the stores offering self-scanning journeys expected to triple by 2028.

Self-scanning technology enables speed, flexibility, and personalization, allowing customers to control their shopping journey and enjoy queue-less checkouts. As the retail landscape continues to evolve, integrating digital shopping journeys will define success in the 21st century.

Integrating Digital Shopping Journeys: The Key to 21st Century Retail Success
The future of retail lies in seamlessly integrating digital shopping journeys within physical stores. This approach, while promising to redefine success in the 21st century, involves incorporating thousands of digital touchpoints, requiring a holistic and seamless integration with existing multivendor infrastructures and ongoing maintenance.

The real challenge? The operational aspect. But technology alone isn’t going to fly. Ensuring these systems work harmoniously is technically complex and resource-intensive, accounting for up to 70% of the costs for retailers. This includes integrating and securing mobile journeys, managing large-scale rollouts of thousands of devices to hundreds of locations globally, ensuring continuous device availability, and confirming that the devices are actively used.

Managing the availability of these digital journeys is crucial. Customers encountering new but unreliable technology will likely become frustrated and may not give it a second chance. Thus, robust, and reliable integration is key to maintaining customer satisfaction and ensuring the successful adoption of digital shopping technologies. By offering deep expertise in orchestrating mobile journeys from implementation to managing complex repair processes, entire rollouts, or optimizing solution usage, retailers can individually determine the level of involvement with tailored services packages in our service offering. And since there’s no one-fits-all when it comes to mobile journeys, we make sure to adapt to each individual retailer’s mobile maturity level from basic up to enhanced service packages to ensure retailers can focus on what really matters: happy shoppers.

Explore how Diebold Nixdorf can help your business adapt to the future of retail, ensuring seamless and personalized customer experiences. To explore the full impact of self-scanning technology on retail, access the complete report here.

 

Source:
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101442/iot-number-of-connected-devices-worldwide/
2. https://gitnux.org/self-checkout-statistics/